Software Engineering Approaches to Ontology Development

Abstract

Ontologies, as formal representations of domain knowledge, enable knowledge sharing between different knowledge-based applications. Diverse techniques originating from the field of artificial intelligence are aimed at facilitating ontology development. However, these techniques, although well known to AI experts, are typically unknown to a large population of software engineers. In order to overcome the gap between the knowledge of software engineering practitioners and AI techniques, a few proposals have been made suggesting the use of well-known software engineering techniques, such as UML, for ontology development (Cranefield 2001a).